June 9, 2006

Well it’s been ages, but I’ve now got something noteworthy to write about. Had some more tests for my egg allergies yesterday. The short version is I’m still allergic. There you go – story over.

The long version: Went into the hospital yesterday morning for my egg allergy “challenge”. This basically consists of them (the doctors) creating this egg-milkshake mix, and feeding it to me in gradually increasing doses (at 15-20min intervals) up to the point where I have as much as would be contained in a normal meal with egg as a non-primary ingredient.

The doses were 5mL, 10mL, 15mL, 25mL, 50mL, 100mL. Anyway, so they plugged me into a few machines to make sure I didn’t die or anything, and put an IV thing in the back of my hand in case they needed to get something into my blood quickly. That in itself was fun – I think the doc was a little nervous – on his first shot he missed the vein, so had to go to the other hand. I’ve probably had more of those things than he’s given, so that was ok. Anyway, a few mins later, on to the doses.

After the first one I was mostly ok – just a bit of irritation in my throat which went away after 5 mins, and apparently some redness on my neck (a bit hard for me to see, but they said that). 10mL upto 25mL was all no symptoms. 50mL I didn’t notice any symptoms, but apparently my face went a bit red, and neck too. They decided to continue with the last dose as it wasn’t killing me and we were so close.

So I took the 100mL does, and all was well for the next 15 mins, so the doctors wandered off to do their doctorey thing and leave me to wait and make sure I didn’t die. Anyway, about an hour later my eyes were getting all puffy and my face a bit too – was a bit disconcerting. About the same time, the doctor came back, and he’s like “Ooh, a positive reaction! We don’t often get these!” So I was treated like a celebrity for the next half hour or so, twas pretty fun – all the attention from the nurses and doctors 😉 The nurses were like “Normally these are so boring and nothing happens.”

Anyway, by then, the doctor decided it was probably not gonna go away quickly, and they should do something about it, so they gave me an adrenalin injection, and that made the puffy face etc go away. Unfortunately, because it got to that stage, I had to sit and wait for another 4 hours to make sure I didn’t get any other delayed reactions, so it was a full day event by the end of it.

Nice, but I wanted to see photos damnit! Next time get someone there with a camera to snap a few so that we know what to look for just in case. Plus they’ll make some coolly disgusting photos (well maybe not really).